Before Kyle Rittenhouse's Murder Trial, a Debate Over Terms Like 'Victim' - The New Yor... - 0 views
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A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.
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Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.
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The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.
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Germans Protect Memorials to Soviet Troops Who Defeated Nazis - The New York Times - 0 views
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In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.
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“We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
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Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.
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Politics should be taught in primary schools, Alastair Campbell says | Alastair Campbel... - 0 views
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the co-host of podcast The Rest is Politics expressed dismay that most students in the UK do not take politics classes unless they choose to study it at A-level.
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Political education needs to start in primary schools, and then become part of the “everyday debate” in children’s entire school experience, he said. “Maybe you don’t call it politics,” he said, suggesting that it could be called “arguing”, “policy” or “big issues”.
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“Some of the most enjoyable stuff I do is going into schools and trying to teach young kids what politics is,” he added. “When they sit down and they start thinking about stuff, it’s just so fascinating and innovative.”
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Silicon Valley's Safe Space - The New York Times - 0 views
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The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.
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Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”
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The community was organized and close-knit. Two Bay Area organizations ran seminars and high-school summer camps on the Rationalist way of thinking.
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Book review - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | The Inquisitive Biolo... - 0 views
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Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.
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, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.
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First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments
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Lawyer Who Used ChatGPT Faces Penalty for Made Up Citations - The New York Times - 0 views
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“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.
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At times during the hearing, Mr. Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with his left hand. He stammered and his voice dropped. He repeatedly tried to explain why he did not conduct further research into the cases that ChatGPT had provided to him.
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For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT.
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Elliot Ackerman Went From U.S. Marine to Bestselling Novelist - WSJ - 0 views
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Years before he impressed critics with his first novel, “Green on Blue” (2015), written from the perspective of an Afghan boy, Ackerman was already, in his words, “telling stories and inhabiting the minds of others.” He explains that much of his work as a special-operations officer involved trying to grasp what his adversaries were thinking, to better anticipate how they might act
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“Look, I really believe in stories, I believe in art, I believe that this is how we express our humanity,” he says. “You can’t understand a society without understanding the stories they tell about themselves, and how these stories are constantly changing.”
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his, in essence, is the subject of “Halcyon,” in which a scientific breakthrough allows Robert Ableson, a World War II hero and renowned lawyer, to come back from the dead. Yet the 21st-century America he returns to feels like a different place, riven by debates over everything from Civil War monuments to workplace misconduct.
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Crisis Negotiators Give Thanksgiving Tips - The New York Times - 1 views
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“Just shut up and listen,
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“Repeating what the other person says, we call that paraphrasing. ‘So what you’re telling me is that the F.B.I. screwed you over by doing this and that,’ and then you repeat back to him what he said
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How to Argue Fairly and Without Rancor (Hello, Thanksgiving!) - The New York Times - 1 views
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this may be a good time to explore what psychologists and philosophers say are the most effective ways to argue
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And by “argue” they do not mean “quarrel,” but communicate without rancor or faulty reasoning with someone who has an opposing viewpoint, with the hope of broadening one’s understanding of people and ideas.
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Listen carefully
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Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views
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Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
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it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
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Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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The death penalty: Strike less hard | The Economist - 3 views
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.
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Social media has weakened all three.
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gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
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For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies' Guinea Pigs - WSJ - 0 views
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The companies touting new chat-based artificial-intelligence systems are running a massive experiment—and we are the test subjects.
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In this experiment, Microsoft, MSFT -2.18% OpenAI and others are rolling out on the internet an alien intelligence that no one really understands, which has been granted the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world.
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Companies have been cautious in the past about unleashing this technology on the world. In 2019, OpenAI decided not to release an earlier version of the underlying model that powers both ChatGPT and the new Bing because the company’s leaders deemed it too dangerous to do so, they said at the time.
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Do Scientists Regret Not Sticking to the Science? - WSJ - 0 views
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In a preregistered large-sample controlled experiment, I randomly assigned participants to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.
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These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.
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... scientists don’t have any special expertise on questions of values and policy. “Sticking to the science” keeps scientists speaking on issues precisely where they ought to be trusted by the public.
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Are we in the Anthropocene? Geologists could define new epoch for Earth - 0 views
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If the nearly two dozen voting members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a committee of scientists formed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), agree on a site, the decision could usher in the end of the roughly 12,000-year-old Holocene epoch. And it would officially acknowledge that humans have had a profound influence on Earth.
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Scientists coined the term Anthropocene in 2000, and researchers from several fields now use it informally to refer to the current geological time interval, in which human activity is driving Earth’s conditions and processes.
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Formalizing the Anthropocene would unite efforts to study people’s influence on Earth’s systems, in fields including climatology and geology, researchers say. Transitioning to a new epoch might also coax policymakers to take into account the impact of humans on the environment during decision-making.
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Francis Fukuyama: Still the End of History - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.
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The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences
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Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.
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Musk Peddles Fake News on Immigration and the Media Exaggerates Biden's Decline - 0 views
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There’s little indication that Biden’s remarks on this occasion—which were lucid, thoughtful, and, as Yglesias noted, cogent—or that any of the countless hours of footage from this past year alone of Biden being oratorically and rhetorically compelling, have meaningfully factored into the media’s appraisal of Biden’s cognitive state
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Instead, the media has run headlong toward a narrative constructed by the very people politically incentivized to paint Biden in as unflattering a light as possible. When news organizations uncritically accept, rather than journalistically evaluate, the assumption that Biden is severely cognitively compromised in the first place, they effectively grant the right-wing influencers who spend their days curating Biden gaffe supercuts the opportunity to set the terms of the debate
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Why does the media take at face value that the viral posts showcasing Biden’s gaffes and slip-ups are truly representative of his current state?
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